Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Metaphors

I am writing this essay on the deck of the inn at which Viable Paradise is held. The workshop finished last night, and the students are leaving. The last survivors are gathered around eating muffins and emitting a sixty cycle hum.

It was seven exhausting and rewarding days, and some of the most fun I’ve ever had with a bunch of writers. And I cannot wait to go home and sleep in my own bed.

Of course, I now have twenty-one days to finish the revisions on 1160 pages of novel (Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth, due to the publisher Nov 1), and so when I return to Connecticut, I will be in my hole with my rock pulled over the entrance.

It also means there’s no way you’re getting a podcast out of me.

Instead, you are getting a painful metaphor.

Writing is like everything else. It’s a truism, a kind of running joke–one can spend endless hours comparing one’s art to one thing or another.

And today, writing stories is like baking bread.

It’s an interesting process. First you have all the ingredients, and you put them together kind of by feel, and hope you get the percentages right. You proof the yeast (is it a good idea?), you set up the sponge (combining characters and conflict), and you maybe then walk away for a while and let it come together. Then you come back, construct the dough (adding more flour… er, characters, salt, and whatever else goes into the bread.)

At this point, what you have is a messy sticky pile of poorly integrated material that glops to your fingers, sticks to your ring that you forgot to take off, and generally is lumpy and adhesive and disgusting.

And you work and work and work and add flour and add too much flour and have to add water and then it needs a little more salt and so on and you mix and mix and knead and knead. And eventually, you find that it’s smoothing out.

And you work and work and work and then suddenly, magically…

It pulls away from the side of the bowl.

It’s coming together. It’s turning into dough. It’s pulling the sticky bits off your fingers.

And that’s when you walk away fro a while and let it rise, once it’s formed into a tidy soft ball.

You give it time–as much time as it needs, and it depends on how warm the kitchen is–and you come back and do it again. You punch it down and knead it. And let it rise again. Then you cut it in half to make loaves, and you go through the rigamarole all over again.

But the magical thing is, it’s bread now. It’s happened. All that mess has unified and turned into one thing.

Which is the part where it’s like a story.

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